Walking on the Ceiling

by Aysegül Savas

  38.

  I found echoes of my conversations with M. all around me, in the books I read, the conversations I overheard at the Café du Coin, the sights on my own walks, as if the world had tightened into a web of signs and symbols. It wasn’t unlike being in love. But at the time I wouldn’t have said that exactly. Not in that way.

  The coincidences were mostly amusing but pointless, like the time M. wrote to me about his fondness for pigeons. He said that these birds, with their bleak urban colors, their crippled claws, and their unendangered abundance, living their lives right in our midst, had always filled him with melancholy. That afternoon, when I was walking to Les Halles past the fishmongers on rue Montorgueil, I noticed all the pigeons wandering around on the wet pavement beneath the stalls. I thought that M.’s compassion towards such unremarkable creatures was typical of the way he saw the world, just like our first meeting to look at the dry Judas trees in the Luxembourg Gardens. I’d thought at the time that it was probably just an excuse to go on a walk, but I realized later that M. had been sincere. He felt endearment for the pathetic, and I worried that I was one among them. Just after I turned off rue Montorgueil, I passed the window display of a natural history bookshop—usually filled with books on seashells, gems, palm trees—and saw that it was covered entirely with prints of pigeons.

  Other coincidences were stranger, like the time I told M. that my mother loved Westerns because they reminded her of Akif amca. I said that the landscape of my mother’s childhood in Aldere was superimposed on another, vaster landscape she had never seen. I did not quite believe my own description but I liked the neat articulation. I also said that even though I did not particularly enjoy these movies, I had watched many of them with my mother, and listed the titles, actors, and quotes, much to M.’s surprise.

  “You should write this story down,” M. said.

  “Which one?”

  “The young girl in a Thracian village, learning about life from cowboys.”

  Some minutes later, we walked past a cinema with a poster of a Western movie hanging at its entrance. As we were laughing at the coincidence, we noticed that the last names of the two lead actors combined made up M.’s own name.

  “I guess it means I have to write the story myself,” M. said.

  The coincidences always amazed me even if I knew that they were neither miracles nor revelations but the result of looking at the world deliberately and searching for connections.

  M. treated these moments as nothing more than our harmony with our surroundings. He told me one time that being in tune to the invisible threads that connected us through time and space was a state he usually achieved only in the depths of writing.

  “You sound like a crystal hunter,” I said.

  “I’ve been meaning to confess to you . . . ,” M. said.

  We were sitting on a bench at the Place Dauphine. We had not eaten all day, and it was already too late to go to our bistro. M. was invited to an event that evening, which, he said, was a gathering of all the old fools in Paris.

  He loved to say this—“old fool”—and he said it often, about himself and about others, but I don’t know what he thought made everyone so foolish.

  “There are so many old fools,” he said. “They continue doing their foolish old things, growing blinder by the day.”

  But it now occurs to me that he actually said these things not as self-deprecation but out of compassion, to undermine his activities and acquaintances, when he must have known that I had no one in the city but him.

  I took out an apple from my bag and bit into it, wiping the juice that trickled down my chin with my hand. I noticed that M. was watching me and smiling.

  The evening had set all at once and M. put his hands deep into his pockets as he often did when he was getting ready to leave. Then he got up, took one hand out of his pocket, and instead of waving like he usually did, extended it towards me as if he were handing me something that he held between his thumb and index finger.

  “I’ll cross the city unspooling our invisible thread,” he said. “Hold tight to the other end.”

  I have since wondered what invisible connection he made as he walked away, leaving me to eat my apple.

  39.

  During university, I took a class on Sufism taught by an English professor who had spent some time with a Sufi group in Bulgaria. I took several classes like this, on topics I was familiar with—history of the Ottoman Empire, Middle Eastern politics. At first, I registered for them because I thought they would get me an easy grade, and provide relief from more difficult subjects, which they did. But I soon realized that whatever I said in these classes was given extra attention, as if I were a guest lecturer. My classmates looked to me during difficult discussions, professors asked me for anecdotes. In the end, I actually studied hardest for these classes, to keep up the image that I was an expert. And with this unexpected attention, I began to feel something like indignation, or smugness; as if I were claiming what had been my right all along.

  On the first day of the Sufism class, when we were introducing ourselves, I announced that I belonged to the Sufi order of Abdülkadir Geylani in Istanbul. I was astonished at the ease with which I could say this, aware of my exaggeration and how exotic it sounded.

  Whenever I saw the professor around campus, he smiled brightly and came over to talk to me. He even invited me to dinner at his house one Christmas holiday when I didn’t go back to Istanbul. He presented me to his wife as the Geylani disciple.

  Their house was filled with rugs and Persian miniatures. His wife showed me the blue ceramics they had collected around Turkey. I remember she had cooked something that seemed strange—a tagine, perhaps, with dried fruits that I found unusual at the time. And I remember that they served tea with dinner. I think they didn’t want to offend me, my Sufi upbringing, with alcohol.

  At the end of my second year, the professor asked me to help him with his research and I quickly accepted, canceling my plans to visit my mother. I enjoyed being this other person, away from Istanbul, surrounded by people who found me enchanting, whom I’d learned to enchant with fictionalized versions of myself.

  I told my mother on the phone that I would spend the break working. My mother didn’t insist, and I told myself that she didn’t mind. I used to tell Molly stories of my independent mother, how devoted she was to her work and routine.

  “She’s probably lost in her readings,” I said, with a hazy picture in my mind of an eccentric woman buried in books.

  “God, you’re lucky,” Molly said. “My parents would call the police or something if they didn’t hear from me for two days.”

  In my absence, my mother had painted the walls of my room and put up new bookshelves. She asked me on the phone what color wood I preferred; whether I would like a new desk.

  When I went to Istanbul the following vacation, I spent most of my time out of the apartment. I met up with my high school friends, Selin, Ezgi, Defne, who were also back for vacation from abroad. We were eager to compare our lives, discuss our new ideas and interests. We went on explorations of the old town, seeing it for the first time with the same interest shown us at our universities abroad. We went to the Grand Bazaar to buy touristic knickknacks to take back—evil-eye beads, ceramic bowls, backgammon boards. We were enthralled by the possibilities of our new identities, the way we could shape them any way we wanted to.

  On that trip, I visited the aunts and even went to Sultan’s gatherings, though my mother and I had stopped attending them when I was in high school. I stayed behind to ask Sultan questions about the history of the order and the proper conduct of a disciple, hoping to return to university with new information. Sultan was very old then, and did not remember many things. She spoke slowly, repeating herself throughout a conversation, talking in circles. Her answers were vague. She said that the specifics did not so much matter as a willingness to set out on the path. But
she was more eager to talk about her youth in Kanlıca, her trips to Europe, her parents’ home on the Black Sea coast.

  I would sometimes spend the night at the aunts’ and they were delighted.

  “Nunu’s staying over because she needs to be fed!” they told my mother on the phone. “Her aunts are preparing a feast for this poor lamb.”

  When I came home, I would go directly to my room. I only wandered around the apartment if my mother was in her bedroom. I left early in the mornings, calling out from the doorway that I was going out, with barely enough time for my mother to come to the hallway before I closed the door.

  “Would you like to have fish in Yeniköy?” she asked in a hurry. “Shall we have a lazy breakfast tomorrow?”

  I told her I would be out with my friends. Sometimes I only shrugged.

  I had not planned to act like this, but once I gave in to it, I felt that the silence had no end. This was different from the silence of my childhood. It kept growing—this meanness inside me I had never known.

  40.

  We would meet at our spot—the exit of the Luxembourg metro—and M. would ask if I had a destination in mind. I usually said no, and we started walking in whatever direction we happened to be facing. M. never minded the rain or the cold and always wore the same dark green jacket, which seemed to adapt to every weather. We often walked into the gardens, tracing the periphery, weaving in and out of the paths, the beehives by Vavin, the Senate walls, the fountain, the circle of marble queens, whose cryptic and subtle facial expressions we discussed on several occasions. It was difficult to say whether they were content or suffering. (“Sometimes,” M. wrote to me, “I can barely tell apart my sorrow from my joy when I’m writing.” Immediately, I recognized the statement as a truth.)

  If I arrived early, I went into the gardens knowing I would find M. there, sitting on a chair by the side of the fountain. He didn’t see me. He would be bent over his notebook and I imagined that he was writing to me, even though we only wrote to each other by e-mail.

  The sight of him from a distance was familiar. His green jacket, his long, crossed legs and thoughtful frown. He looked like an old man and also like a young boy, and watching him from a distance, I felt that I could focus on all of him at once. After some time, I turned back and walked to our spot by the metro to wait, and after a while he appeared across the street, taking his hand out of his pocket to greet me.

  Some days we walked down rue de Seine or rue Bonaparte to the river. We passed by the lively cafés, art galleries, map shops, and patisseries with fantastical displays, all of which, we agreed, were more beautiful from a distance, without pausing to look for too long. As such they retained the unspoiled sense of a neighborhood full of possibilities. Before we emerged from the sheltered world of Saint-Germain, M. pointed out the Alpine bookshop, which he admired for the specificity of its books. He admitted that he’d never actually been inside this shop, whose subject matter did not particularly interest him, but said that he was happy it was there. In his love for these peculiar places, he was like an anthropologist, or an accountant. I couldn’t quite tell which, because I was never certain what lay beneath M.’s fascinations. Sometimes I imagined that they were a sign of sorrow, a wish to care for and preserve things on the brink of disappearance. Other times, I thought that they were nothing more than a tedious desire to accumulate.

  “Here it is,” M. said, every time we passed the bookshop. “I’m so happy someone thought of such a place.”

  He said it in the same way each time, as if he were experiencing the joy afresh. Then, one afternoon, he said, “You never tell me I’ve told you this before. You’re kind to humor this old fool.”

  “I know you like the shop,” I said.

  I also knew that things don’t loosen their grip so easily, with a single utterance.

  When we reached the river, we took the stairs down to the water, following the line of poplars all the way to the winged horses of the Pont Alexandre III, then back, up past where we had descended the stairs. We often went to the flower market on Île de la Cité and walked its two short stretches multiple times, for the pleasure of being among the potted palms, camellias, and olives. When we walked off the island, we went in the direction of Châtelet so that we could walk past the blue-and-gold clock studded with stars on the Conciergerie, and one of us would invariably say something, then, about “The Invention of Midnight.”

  M. did not mind the repetition of these walks, the way a child will not tire of listening to a favorite story. It amazed me that we always walked the most beautiful parts of the city, what might even be called the city’s clichés. If I were guiding us on our walks, I might have saved them for special occasions, as one saves wedding china and silk dresses. But M. was not sparing with beauty; he lived it fully and constantly, shared it generously.

  We went into museums like veering off into alleyways. These visits were never planned and we walked through the exhibits as if they were city streets, without really stopping, pausing only if something caught our attention. M. was more attentive in small, municipal museums than at the grand ones full of visitors. He mostly looked around him quickly, at times making a small sound of recognition or surprise.

  “That’s something,” he said from time to time. Then, without waiting for me to respond, he continued walking, picking up our conversation where we had left it.

  Now, it surprises me even more that M. and I could surround ourselves with beauty and not pay particular attention to it. I feel that we were always breaking the rules, defying the proper way to do something. Perhaps I only say this because life here in Istanbul now is so deprived of these indulgences.

  41.

  Even when we don’t have the heart to read the papers, are too worried to consider all the possibilities, and have lost count of all that’s vanished, we continue to talk about Taksim Square. It is the cliché of the changing times. Or perhaps its symbol.

  The square is unrecognizable now, this much is true. There are the old black-and-white photographs of the tram running down İstiklal in winter, blurred by snow, the chestnut sellers looking on. These pictures resurface time and again in outraged newspapers, as if to press on our wound.

  Some are still protesting to salvage scraps. But it’s easier to give it up, without struggle. To say, “Alright, you have this as well, take it and do what you will. Take it all, change it completely.” With the hope that we may be left in peace, even if it’s on one tiny plot of land.

  But there’s no denying that it’s a shock to see the square—to walk up İstiklal and emerge at Taksim expanding like a desert. And the people who gather there now, all those men without roots. They find solace in this nameless place, in its formless expanse. The orphans of the city.

  42.

  When I returned to Istanbul from England to take care of my mother, we pretended that I was back for vacation and that as soon as she got a bit better I would go to Paris to start the literature program. We didn’t talk about the previous years, how long it had been since I’d been home.

  I heard her on the phone, talking to people I’d never met. In my absence, she had made friends. Later, these friends came over with food, with flowers.

  “Nunu is visiting,” my mother told them on the phone. “We’re finally reunited, back in our nest.”

  She listened to their stories with curiosity, her face showing concern and surprise. She called these friends “darling,” “sweetie.” I didn’t know when my mother had begun to change, to become like the mothers of girls I used to know.

  “You might as well make use of this time,” she said to me. “Now that you’re here. There are so many new places in the city.”

  We were still timid around each other then.

  I left the house each day for a little bit, this time not to shut her out, as I’d wanted to on my previous visits, but to please her, and make her feel that she was not as sick as she
really was. Besides, I could do little for her in those days, beyond keeping the household in order, and witnessing her pain.

  In the mornings, I walked to the supermarket to shop for lunch or simply wander the aisles, after which I sat on a park bench to read and wait for an appropriate amount of time to pass before I returned home.

  I told my mother, once or twice, that I had met up with my friends, Selin, Ezgi, and Defne, and gave her news of their lives. In reality, I no longer had any desire to see these friends, who were now settled in Istanbul with purpose and motivation after returning from their studies abroad. Two of them were engaged. They were pursuing interesting and ambitious careers. I imagined they would ask me about my news, and I would have none to give.

  My mother listened eagerly whenever I talked about my friends and this, too, surprised me. During high school, she knew little about these girls and our uncomplicated friendships, formed from occasional outings around the city, and spending time at their houses after school, though I never returned the invitations.

  The few times I stayed overnight, the mothers would prepare pastries and cakes, or let us order pizza. They sat with us for a while, then left us alone when we began laughing hysterically over the smallest things. At night, they came to the bedroom to tell us they were going to sleep. We would be sitting on the floor, listening to music or looking through magazines.

  One time, Selin’s mother came in and started snapping her fingers in rhythm to the music.

  “Mom, what are you doing?” Selin said. And then she said, getting up to hug her, “She tries so hard to be cool.”

  * * *

  —

  When I graduated from high school, the aunts urged my mother to host a lunch for my friends.

  “Would Nunu want any of that fuss?” my mother said, and I responded that I wouldn’t. I was uncomfortable at the thought of my friends seeing my life at home. The aunts finally organized the lunch themselves and invited many of my classmates. Those days, it was fashionable to meet in Tophane to smoke hookah or go to the Kadıköy fish market for beers and fries. My classmates doubtless found it peculiar to gather at the home of a great-aunt, with lace tablecloths and crystal glasses from which we drank Fanta. But I didn’t mind this. I even enjoyed my unfashionable ordinariness.